Paul Miller
Principal Analyst

Author Insights
Blog
The Race To Put Cars In The Cloud Is … Confusing
Cloud providers and carmakers keep announcing grand partnerships. The reality is more complex and, often, less exciting.
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Blog
The Next Industrial Revolution Must Celebrate The Worker
In the race for efficiency, modernity, and profit, we risk forgetting the needs, value, and importance of our human workforce.
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Blog
Make Room For Public Clouds In Your Industrial IoT Strategy
Not too long ago, executives from manufacturing and related industries would not consider running their internet of things (IoT) initiatives from a cloud. Now? It’s hard to find one who doesn’t enthusiastically embrace some role for the public cloud. Makers of industrial IoT (IIoT) software platforms have undergone a similar change of heart, pivoting from […]
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Blog
With Good Foundations, Augmented Reality Offers A Great Way To Engage With IoT Data
Augmented reality (AR) and the internet of things (IoT) — in principle, these two hot technologies are a great match, with data streaming from IoT-connected machines to be used by AR-wielding engineers on the factory floor. My latest report, “Combine Augmented And Mixed Reality With IoT To Deliver Insight At The Point Of Need,” began […]
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Blog
2019 Saw Industrial IoT Software Platforms Get Richer
My colleague Michele Pelino and I published “The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms, Q4 2019” recently, and we’ll be discussing the findings in more detail in a webinar on January 30. It’s a complex space, where traditional industrial conglomerates, established enterprise software giants, networking and telecom providers, hyperscale cloud providers, global systems integrators, professional […]
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Infographic
IoT Brings Value To Your Supply Chain . . . If You Can Find The Talent
Michele Pelino and I have been digging into Forrester Analytics’ Technographics® data, looking at big opportunities for the internet of things (IoT) — and identifying some of the consistent stumbling blocks to adoption. Michele and Frank Gillett have already done some great work here, updating documents such as “Internet-Of-Things Heat Maps For Operational Excellence, 2019” […]
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Blog
Digital Twins Combine Enterprise Data And IoT To Drive New Business Value
The explosion of data in the IoT era has machinery designers taking a new look at how they use digital twins. Principal Analyst Paul Miller examines the trend.
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Blog
IoT Takes Service-Based Business Models To Less Expensive Assets, But The Organizational Change May Prove Too Difficult For Many
Rolls-Royce began shifting its business model away from selling expensive metal, plastic, and carbon-fiber products (jet engines) toward delivering the service of miles flown way back in 1962. Now, with TotalCare, the company earns more than half of its revenues from delivery of a service, not sale of a product. Rolls-Royce is not alone. Its […]
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Blog
Requesting Your Help With A Survey On Smart Manufacturing
I’ve written a lot about the ways in which traditional product makers are being transformed by digital. In “From Grease To Code: Industrial Giants Must Bet Their Futures On Software,” for example, I explored ways in which industrial firms are having to reinvent themselves as they augment a hundred years of experience making physical products […]
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Blog
IoT And Blockchain: Are We There Yet?
Why are IoT + blockchain success stories still so hard to find?
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Blog
Manufacturers’ Digital Transformation Will Fail Without Both IT And OT
If you believe the stereotypes, then the worlds of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) are very different. In one, ranks of commoditized beige boxes hold institutional memory, critical intellectual property, and the bosses’ email: The data center is everything. In the other, proprietary, expensive, and arcane electromechanical monsters lurk next to the production […]
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Blog
Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, And Mixed Reality Do Bring Value To Industry
Back in August of last year, I asked for good examples of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality, and mixed reality (MR), all together known as extended reality. Unsurprisingly, I saw plenty of examples of the type my original post complained about: visually stunning but almost entirely useless for anything other than showing off. Then there […]
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Blog
Unlock The Mysteries Of IoT Pricing
Koninklijke Philips has come a long way since the Philips family began making light bulbs in the Dutch city of Eindhoven in 1891. Today the company focuses on healthcare, but it wants to do more than just build and sell medical products. The Financial Times recently quoted Philips CEO Frans van Houten: “In the future, […]
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Blog
Four Types Of Edge Matter To Your IoT Deployments
The edge, and edge computing, figure prominently in a lot of internet of things (IoT) discussions right now. But where — and what — the edge is very quickly gets complicated. Telecom operators understand the edge of their network. Sellers of servers and gateways know what they’d like their customers to fill the edge with. Beneficiaries of […]
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Blog
Does Africa Present An Opportunity For The Chinese Clouds?
Africa is home to 20% of our planet’s land and 16% of its people, but none of the hyperscale public clouds run from data centers there — yet. Microsoft will offer Azure from data centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg later this year, and Amazon recently announced plans to follow suit with an Amazon Web Services […]
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Blog
IoT Platforms Do Not Steal Customer Data
There’s a recurring assumption in discussions about internet of things (IoT) platforms: The platform providers make their money by mining insights from data loaded into their platform. They sell those insights back to the customer who put the data there in the first place and will also sell them to anyone else who can pay. […]
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Blog
Not Everyone Deserves To Conduct The Multicloud Orchestra
Multicloud is a real and increasingly strategic customer choice rather than an accident of poor or nonexistent planning. We all know that; I’ve written about it before. Vendors of cloud tools and solutions are clearly aware of the multicloud trend as well and are moving to position themselves to best advantage. But there’s a problem: For too […]
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